When confronted with a birthday in a week I will remember that a book can be a really good present, too.

It is a peculiarity of knitters that they chronically underestimate the amount of time it takes to knit something. Birthday on Saturday? No problem. Socks are small. Never mind that the average sock knit out of sock-weight yarn contains about 17,000 stitches. Never mind that you need two of them. (That's 34,000 stitches, for anybody keeping track.)
Socks are only physically small. By stitch count, they are immense.

ribbing, moss, seed, and garter are all balanced and combine the yin and yang of knitting

Knitters use knitting to value-add to the world.

Sweaters need to be imagined, dreamed over.

It's only knitting and it's one of the few times in your life when there are no bad consequences to a mistake.